Lost (and found) in Translation

Until Christoph Martin Wieland's effort in the 1760s, Shakespeare's works remained largely inaccessible to German readers.In striking contrast, German translations of bestselling English novels were hugely popular from the 1740s onwards.Thanks to the enthusiasm for Shakespeare's characters which mid-century Bardolatry generated, many of these novels feature scores of Shakespeare quotations in their narrative voice, dialogue and fictional letters, and these scattered intertextual references must have provided the first contact with Shakespeare's language for many German readers who enjoyed English novels in translation.The article discusses three ways in which German translators handled these references.Shakespeare quotations may simply be deleted, sometimes due to ignorance but also in cases where the English text does mention Shakespeare or one of his characters.Other translators are impressively alert to very subtle stylistic markers of intertextuality, and reproduce their effect for characterization or humour with remarkable creativity.In passages where Shakespeare is quoted alongside other authors, the 'competition' is again resolved or represented in different ways in translation.These observations are made on the basis of a sample, using analytical categories that were first developed for work on a large corpus of quotations from Shakespeare in English literature between 1600 and 1800.If a serviceable corpus of Shakespeare quotations in early translations could be established, the presented insights could be used to identify more general patterns of how quotations and their markings fared in translation and how popular fiction may have shaped the perception of Shakespeare in early Continental readers.